Food For Thought
Failing better.
Here’s a story about a failed school lunch programme. A small Primary school in a rural town had signed up for the lunch programme rolled out by the Government. Demographically, they were absolutely the target — low socio-economic group for whom food security is a pressing issue.
The lunches arrived. They’d been made that morning, early, and been transported in a chiller truck for 1.5 hours from the nearest city. The results were unspectacular. Wilted greens, soggy bread and cakes. Fruit that was wet on the outside. Unsurprisingly, this didn’t go down too well with the kids.
So, the next year the school (and other schools in the town) made a choice to contract locally to a catering firm. The firm took on additional staff to cater (heh) for demand.
I was still teaching then, and the lunches that arrived were fresh, delicious, impeccably presented and incredibly desirable to the kids. Sandwiches and wraps, pasta salad with mayonnaise, burgers that were cold but filling and edible. Once a week they even got a pitta bread pizza that arrived still warm, placed between layers of greaseproof paper. Occasionally there’d be nachos with a light salsa and sour cream.
It was more than that though. There’d also be a yoghurt or a small cake, and piece of fruit. Any leftover food, from kids who were absent or didn’t eat everything, either got rolled over to the following day’s morning tea for kids who didn’t have some — or got sent home to those kids you knew weren’t likely to eat a lot until they came into breakfast club the next day.
The kids wrote letters to the catering firm staff, thanking them for the delicious food and telling them what their favourites were. We got a letter back from them, thanking us for eating the food they made.
This is a story of success from an initial failure. It’s also a story about schools being able to make the right choice, not just for their students but their community. It’s about a catering firm in a small rural community being able to hire additional staff at a point where jobs were leaking out of town like there was a crack in the place.
Less Money, More Waste
When David Seymour announced he was cutting the cost of a school meal down from $8 to $3 last year, as part of saving a hundred-odd million dollars on the programme — the media release that came with it had some extremely weird statements in it.
For instance, they asked 1000-ish schools about how many lunches went uneaten each day. 400 responded, with around a 91% consumption rate of food. 91% is an extremely good number when you are talking about hundreds of thousands of meals.
They also claimed that while they didn’t have any data on waste, one anecdote had one area of one city where a 10m3 bin was filled each week with food waste. Except; which area, which city, how many schools was that? Why, when we’re talking about feeding kids, are you so vague about this? It’s because there’s actually very little evidence to support the cuts.
Seymour’s plan, like seemingly all of his policies, is to centralise power and control in the hands of a few. For a libertarian, he sure does like the idea of the Government ordering food en-masse from a list of approved suppliers and it being delivered to a limited number of corporate caterers.
Lunches in our rural town are back to being delivered from the nearest city, either warm or to be warmed on-site. Fresh food? Sorry, that’s beyond the $3 budget. Turns out some things are too good for the kids of this country.
It’s incredibly likely that cutting $130 a million a year without, and I’m sorry but this is hilarious, “…without sacrifices to quality and nutrition.” has actually increased the amount of food that is wasted by the programme. It will be fascinating to see if that 91% of food consumed stat has dropped because of the new, worse, food.
Malign Incompetence
If you were cynical, you’d say that this was on purpose.
Waste increases after cuts to quality, so the Minister scraps the programme saying that it’s a waste of money.
Except I don’t believe that, not entirely. What we’re seeing is what happens when someone who espouses libertarian ideals runs into the opportunity of exercising power using the state — they simply cannot resist some centralised control, with all that comes with that.
For instance, the dreadful slop in trays being delivered hours late or not at all have been dismissed as teething, questions of quality has been brushed off by David Seymour as everyone having opinions as they do about Michelin star restaurants or Maccas.
Except they don’t, because neither of those operate at the scale Seymour has deliberately contracted the slop in tray to be delivered by. Both operate at delivering food within a time-limit, usually as freshly made as it can be. I’m not sure where Seymour’s been eating, but I’m damn sure it costs more than $3 a meal and none of it arrives in a tray to be reheated.
The food we’re seeing is objectively unappetising, unrecognisable and clearly of a lower quality — as if it’s almost 66% cheaper than what was delivered before.
There’s also the knock-ons. How many catering firms who operated in rural towns have had to drop staff, how many schools are no longer employing people. How many food retailers in these places are losing out on the ability to provide fresh local food to the caterers, or the schools making food directly?
A local high-school had employed staff to make school lunches on site, using locally sourced ingredients. Again, money going into a community that badly needs it. They don’t employ those staff members any more, just someone to heat up the horrible silver trays you’re seeing on social media.
David Seymour doesn’t see that the school lunch programme put good food in good kids to help them get a good education. He didn’t see it employing people in places where work is hard to come by, and that money being put into the local community and ensuring the economic benefit of a sandwich, some fruit and a yoghurt went much further than a stomach.
Food for Thought
David Seymour isn’t a stupid person, but he lacks the ability to imagine the world as it exists for people who actually live in it. The real world, the one where people struggle to pay their bills or look at interest rate changes with the hope that maybe they can make their money stretch a bit further.
Instead it’s about cutting big numbers to get a warm glow from headlines, about staged photo opportunities where he eats a carefully prepared tray of food and declares it very tasty and then hopes to never eat one again unless something goes wrong with his programme.
He’s a think-tank guy, a professional politician who last interacted with the real world at some point before the 2008 Global Financial Crisis. Yet he’s built this carefully managed reputation as an outspoken rebel, an outsider in the political world he’s now spent almost his entire adult life inside.
No wonder only 8.64% of the voting population took a look at what he was serving and decided to try it. That’s a 91.36% non-consumption rate, or coincidentally almost the complete reverse of the lunch programme take-up rate.
In a way, I guess, Seymour is very much like his new lunches. Shiny container, shit inside.
